Dan Hodges is a former Labour Party and GMB trade union official, and has managed numerous independent political campaigns. He writes about Labour with tribal loyalty and without reservation. You can read Dan's recent work here

Obama has put the Republicans out of business

Yesterday Barack Obama didn’t just win an election. He also put the Republican party, in its current incarnation, out of business.

The terminal decline of the two great American parties has been talked about before. It was predicted in 1964, when Johnson destroyed Goldwater, and in 1988 when George Bush senior defeated Mike Dukakis. At those points many sensible analysts seriously questioned whether the ’64 Republicans or ’88 Democrats could ever occupy the White House again.

But the scale of the devastation facing the GOP is unprecedented in post war American politics. They lost a presidential race they were expected to win. They lost Senate race after Senate race they were expected to win. And this morning they woke up to the reality that more Americans have now voted Democrat than Republican in five out of the last six presidential elections, stretching back over a quarter of a century.

Mitt Romney gave a dignified and gracious concession speech last night. But no amount of sympathy can mask the fact that he was a truly terrible candidate. His biography was wrong, he made blunder after blunder, and in each presidential debate, Denver aside, he totally failed to impose himself on a contest he should have been in with a shot of winning.

Yet he was the best candidate the Republican party had. It was a choice between Romney or Herman Cain and his man-eating chickens, Michelle Bachman and her vengeful hurricanes, (that would have played well with Chris Christie) or Newt Gingrich and his space station.

The hanging chads in Florida broke Democrat hearts in 2000. But it also allowed Republicans to ignore the ugly truth that their party was slowly decaying from within and losing touch with the nation they sought to serve.

Barack Obama is painted by the Right as a divisive figure. But he has successfully built and retained a coalition encompassing white voters, black voters, young voters, Jewish voters, middle-class voters, women voters and Hispanic voters. In contrast, Mitt Romney and the Republicans have again been reduced to trying to construct a winning electoral coalition exclusively from the votes of angry white men.

For years the GOP has been sitting on a ticking demographic time bomb. And this was the election it finally detonated. The Democrats already went into the 2012 campaign with a lock on big electoral vote states like California, Pennsylvania and New York. On current trends they will soon be able to add states like Florida, Virginia, Colorado and Arizona to that list. At that point the Democrats will not just be the natural party of government, they will be the party, period.

I’m not sure Republicans realise the scale of the mess they're in. During my fascinating debate with Tim Stanley on Monday he talked to me about what he saw as the Democrats' liberal extremism. But as I tried to explain to him, in 2012 progressive views on race, homosexuality and women’s rights aren’t representative of a liberal viewpoint any more than opposition to sending children down chimneys or opposition to the ducking of suspected witches is a liberal viewpoint. It is the settled worldview of a modern social democracy, and the Republicans' need to rage against it makes them effectively unelectable.

Look at the debate about abortion. As I’ve written before, many sensible, compassionate conservatives have entirely respectable – if different to mine – views on the issue. But in the course of the campaign the Republicans allowed a debate about the legitimacy of abortion to turn into a debate about the legitimacy of rape. You can parse Richard Mourdock and Todd Akin’s comments as much as you want. But when a party is putting forward as its candidates for high office people with views like that, it sends the signal to the electorate that this is a party operating on a different value set from their own. And contrary to the stereotype so beloved by some on the left, most Americans are not pistol touting, bible bashing fundamentalists.

The Republican party now has a choice. It can blame their latest defeat on the MSM. It can condemn Mitt Romney for being irresolutely conservative. It can berate his campaign for dragging him too far to the centre.

Or they can start to realise that their current Tea Party, shock jock, Obama-is-the-anti-Christ brand of conservatism just isn’t compatible with electoral success. More importantly, they can learn the lesson learnt by so many of us who have spent our days trudging through the political wilderness: parties don’t get to decided where the political mainstream is, the voters do.